


With Lilies and With Laurel

by dewinter



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 20:28:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3354224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Days pass, and Steve goes back to the VA. That’s what killers do, isn’t it? Return to the scene of the crime. Or maybe this is what pilgrims feel like. Searching for grace, or else for absolution.</i>
</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>They don't all make it out of the Triskelion alive. Steve, searching for Bucky, weighed down by grief and guilt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Lilies and With Laurel

_Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them._

_Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it._

_Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength._

_Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom._

_Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure._

-          Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit-Gathering (1916)

 

* * *

 

 

Steve wakes, aching. His throat feels like he’s been screaming for centuries. There’s a strange, numbed tightness across his torso, and his nose is itching. The only sound in the room is a ponderous, steady beeping. The air conditioning is turned up too high; it always is in this century, he’s found.

Steve reaches up to scratch his nose, and feels a sharp pull at the back of his hand. His eyes crack open, and all he sees is white.

‘Captain Rogers,’ a voice is saying. There are sounds outside, metallic wheels and muffled voices, and as his eyes grow accustomed to the daylight, he sees hanging hospital curtains and an IV stand and the beeping machine, a thin, pulsing green line threading its reassuring way across the screen.

‘Hi,’ the woman who lives across the hall from him says, from the chair next to the bed. Unease coils in his chest, and it takes him several seconds to remember why.

‘You’re not a nurse,’ he says, wary, and it comes out hoarse and scratched.

‘No,’ she says.

‘You’re with S.H.I.E.L.D.’

Her mouth quirks. ‘Well. That’s – under review.’

‘Bucky?’ he says, inevitably. The name is always waiting there, lingering on the tip of his tongue. Tastes like blood, sharp and coppery.  

His neighbour frowns. ‘He’s in the wind. Some reported sightings. Captain, you can’t—’

‘I’m going after him.’

‘Not with your internal organs all shot up, you’re not.’

Steve shifts. It’s too much like the last awakening. It seemed impossible, that he could feel tired, drained, after seventy years of sleep. He’s been out for mere days this time, surely, but he’s exhausted and restless and aching still.

He’ll fight this battle later; he’s going to need all the strength he’s ever had.  

‘N—Nat?’ he asks, staring down at where the cannula’s taped to the back of his hand.

‘Blew her cover. They’re dragging her up in front of some congressional committee. Chances are they’ll be after you, too.’

Steve feels sick. He knows how it will go. Natasha will vanish in a tornado of cryptic smiles and stern glances and vague un-promises, leaving Steve still stuttering apologies, staggering under the weight of all the debt and all the guilt.

_How about a friend?_

He doesn’t ask about Fury. His veins have gobbled up whatever drugs they’ve pumped into him, and he’s left with only vestiges of wooziness. His mind is spinning, but it’s still sharp enough to remember that Fury’s survival is a secret.

‘Sam?’ he asks, finally.

She presses her lips together, tight. She has nice eyes – it’s not the first time Steve’s noticed. He’s looking at her eyes, and she’s casting them down, away from his, and shaking her head gently. And all of a sudden Steve realises he should have asked about Sam sooner, that Sam should have been the very first person he asked after, and that this is where the regret starts.

He tries to say Sam’s name again, but it turns into a panicked croak.

‘They – Rumlow – the Triskelion, after Sam was grounded –’ She trails off. The line of her mouth is bowed with misery.

‘He’s dead.’ He’s not sure he’s got the energy to make it into a question.

She nods. Her eyes are glittering. She’s not a coward; she raises them to meet his.

There’s a furious, rushing sound in his ears. He’s heard it once before; clinging to the blasted-open side of a speeding train, the winter freezing the tears on his cheeks and the scream in his throat. He thought it was the cold roaring past him, then. But it’s back, all of a sudden, in a quiet little hospital room in the twenty-first century, deafening. It’s not the cold. It must be the sound a heart makes when something is torn from it.

‘Steve,’ she says. She’s still holding his gaze.

He presses his lips together so tightly they ache. It’s an old trick. There are different sorts of pain, and Steve knows from long, bitter experience that some are easier to endure than others.

‘Your name’s not Kate,’ he says, dumb, numb.

She smiles sadly. ‘No. Sharon.’

Steve nods. He could warn her; he could say _See. This is what happens to the people around me. Don’t get too close._

Instead he leans his head back into the pillow – too soft, too fucking soft, _like sleeping on a marshmallow_ – and closes his eyes.

*

They keep him in overnight, even though the bullet wounds in his abdomen have already healed into neat, puckered scars.

When he wakes, Sharon is no longer at his bedside, and Sam is still dead.

*

He gets back to his apartment four days after the helicarriers go down. Sam’s been dead four days; a day longer than Steve knew him. Steve counts up the hours. He tries to remember the length and slant of the shadows on the Mall, to pinpoint the exact moment when they met. Sam was wearing a grey sweater, darkened with sweat at the neck; that much he remembers. It seems a lifetime ago.

Steve used to think he knew just how spiteful the universe could be. He remembers raging at the injustice, in the few desperate days between Bucky’s death and what he thought was his, bargaining soundlessly with a fickle God for Bucky’s life. But at least, at least the universe gave him _years_ with Bucky. Poor, scrappy years, scraping by on wits and gumption and sheer dumb luck – but years, nonetheless, not a paltry handful of helter skelter, heart-in-mouth days.

Steve spends days shut up in his apartment, eating dry toast and trying to remember how it went, with Sam, how those meagre days played themselves out, how they got from Steve teasing Sam with the sweat still cooling on their skin, to Steve, unconscious and bullet-ridden in a hospital bed, and to Sam, dead. How they got here, how they got to _this._

There’s a lot to think about – to _process_ , Tony would probably say – but inertia’s the worst cure for sadness, so Steve sets about cleaning up the debris from the night of the shooting. He gouges the bullet from the wall and scrubs the bloodstains with steel wool and wraps the shards of glass that used to be the window in newspaper before throwing them in the trash, and tries not to think about Bucky standing on the rooftop opposite, his eye to the sight. Crosshairs. Steady hands. Breathe in. Out. Hold. Just like years ago, in cold French forests.

He’s been wishing Bucky back to life for so long. It kept him company for seventy frozen years, and it’s a hard habit to break. He keeps trying to press the treacherous, unbidden thought back into the depths of his selfish mind, but it keeps bubbling back to the surface: Bucky would be better off dead. Bucky should have died on that mountain. It would have been a kindness.

_Be careful,_ they say, fables and horror stories. _Be careful what you wish for._

He knows how dangerous wishes are, now, but it doesn’t stop him wishing for Sam, miserably, willing him to breeze through the door at any minute, water bottle in hand, bouncing impatiently on his heels, saying _ready to eat my dust, old man,_ alive, _alive_.

*

He doesn’t see Natasha, but she’s around, he knows. There’s a carton of pad thai cooling on the worktop one evening, with a plastic folder underneath it. Printouts from the internet – men with metal arms, sightings from every corner of the country. Some must be hoaxes or mistaken identities, surely. Bucky is everywhere and nowhere.

Nat has scribbled a note to him on the topmost piece of paper (Chicago. Shots fired at an abandoned hospital).

_ EAT!!!!!  _

And then,

_if he was in any of these places, he’s long gone by now. get better. need to build up a pattern. be careful._

And then (and Steve feels himself smile for the first time since the bridge),

_:)_

*

It’s raining when they bury him. Steve has no idea what Sam thought about rain; he had no occasion to ask him. In three days, he had no occasion to ask him a lot of things – the sorts of things friends pick up about each other, accidentally, without noticing, over years.

Steve finds himself getting stuck on stupid, inconsequential things like that – on whether Sam liked the rain, liked the smell of it on hot tarmac – he keeps getting stuck, so he fills in some of the gaps for himself. Sam would have hated _this_ sort of rain, he decides. It’s a grim, sluicing washout, drenching the mourners, slicking the rows and rows and rows of neat white graves.

There are black umbrellas clustered, beetling around where they’re lowering Sam’s body into the mud. Their shoes and the bottoms of their pants are splashed with dirt. Steve stands far off, the tree above him providing only a little shelter from the rain. He can’t hear what they’re saying, and he supposes he doesn’t deserve to. They might be crying, but he can’t tell.

He might have counted them as friends, eventually. They have open, honest faces, even when their heads are bowed with sudden, bitter grief. Steve knows, without exchanging a single word with them, that they would have welcomed him into their homes, just as Sam did. Families built on love work the same way now as they did seventy years ago.

There are children among them. Cousins, maybe, siblings, even. Someone had to crouch down next to them, and try to explain the inexplicable. The great mystery. How do you explain this: the days of being swung squealing into the air, the days of pickup football at family barbeques, the days of _Sam,_ they’re in the past now. They’re _then,_ and this – black, unfamiliar clothes, relentless rain, the sacred, morbid hush of bereavement – this is _now_. 

Steve saw his mom cry, once. Rudy Valentino was dead, and his mother was, briefly, distraught. Steve slipped his spindly arms around her heaving shoulders and prayed for the ability to absorb her grief, to take it within his little heart, and eat it all up. Steve’s older now. He knows his mother must have cried for him, too. Maybe when letting the doctor out of the apartment – _nothing left but to hope and pray, I’m afraid, Mrs Rogers_ – maybe when filling a bowl with cooling water, scared of leaving Steve’s bedside for a moment. As long as her face was hidden, as long as Steve couldn’t see. Maybe Sam’s family are hiding their faces from the children, because children grow up when they see their parents cry. Their souls harden and their once-sweet love becomes too fierce.

How do you tell a child that in a moment Sam passed from _is_ to _was_ , that his body is still here, _right here_ , but Sam – Sam is not? How do you tell a child of this century that Captain America did that, caused that moment?

The crowd disperses. Sam is sixty, seventy yards away. He’s _right there_. Within reach, and out of reach.

Steve fills in the gaps. Sam would have hated it, down there in the mud. The darkness and the slow ignominious creep of decay. Steve would have burned him up, cast his ashes to the four winds. He’d have thought of birds as he stretched out his emptying hands. He let Bucky fall; he’d have let Sam fly.

Riley’s in the wind. Steve thinks Sam would have liked it up there, too. On a clear day, there’s a hell of a view.

*

Fury’s buried close enough to Sam that Steve can still see the fresh pile of earth by the time he reaches the sham headstone. _The path of the righteous man_. Steve knows all about righteous men, and the bloodstains they leave in their wake. There’s an empty grave for Bucky here too, somewhere.

It’s like that old game they used to play down by the docks, on upturned crates. Three walnut shells. A shrivelled orange pip. A nickel a time. _Which one’s it gonna be?_ Hands switching, switching, faster than your eyes could take in. _Which one’s it gonna be? Where’s the pip?_

Three graves, one body. _Which one’s it gonna be?_

Fury steps from behind a tree.

‘Sir.’ Steve’s not said a word to anyone since he left the hospital, drifting on autopilot, but his voice comes out firm and steady, and he’s glad of it.

‘We've been data-mining HYDRA's files,’ Fury says. ‘Looks like a lot of rats didn't go down with the ship. I'm heading to Europe tonight. Wanted to ask if you'd come.’

There’s something refreshing about it: no preamble, just business. They’d be good together. Cutting a swathe across Europe. Righteous men. Vanquished foes. S.H.I.E.L.D., avenged. Kill them, punish them, and leave no room for the grief to get in the way. They could run and run, and paint Europe red, whatever that’s worth, but Sam will still be right _here,_ and Steve will still be the one who put him here, in the ground. Or as good as.

‘There’s some things I need to take care of.’ He doesn’t answer to Fury any more, and it’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

Fury nods. ‘Alright then.’

They shake hands, and Fury walks away.

Steve’s heading in the opposite direction when Fury calls after him. ‘Cap.’

Steve turns back. There’s a pull of foreboding in his belly, like this might be the last time they ever see each other. ‘I’m sorry about Wilson.’

Steve nods. ‘It’s a war,’ he says, as though that makes it any easier.

*

Peggy has this comforter, a patchwork of crocheted squares in bright, clashing colours. Bucky’s mother had one just the same. She was forever adding squares to it, using up old scraps and ends of wool in precious pockets of time, her index finger holding the yarn out taut, her hook bobbing rhythmically. Steve wondered if it was magic, when he was little.

Peggy’s comforter is edged in pink satin ribbon, and it’s spread neatly over her knees. She’s sleeping when Steve slips into her room. He’s secretly, ashamedly relieved; she’d forgive him, probably. He is losing her in increments, inch by inch, but today at least he is spared the blank look she gives him more and more frequently.

He pulls the visitor’s chair close to her bed, and sits down. The still-fragile flesh of his stomach twinges briefly. When things get cold, they crack. Peggy’s breathing is shallow, but steady. Steve leans forward and rests his cheek on the comforter, by her hip.

They were in a bombed-out pub, the ghost of a song clinging to the splintered rafters. Long ago. Peggy dealt in logic and pride, and not in sentiment. _Allow him the dignity of his choice_ , she told him, clipped and sensible, almost brusque, because the men who peopled her world demanded that of her, and he was so angry with her, angry with her, and with Zola, and with Phillips. And with _Bucky_ , stupid, foolhardy Bucky, who’d been wading into the fights Steve started for years, and paid for it in bloodied knuckles and blacked eyes and eventually with much, much more than that. Bucky, who should have known better.

Steve listened to Peggy’s cool, rational comfort, his hand curled around the neck of a bottle that would never be deep enough to drown his sorrow, and he was angrier than he’d ever been in his life. It wasn’t the righteous fury of his stunted youth; it was selfish, gnawing, irrational anger. It flooded into the numb chambers of his heart, filled him up. It was the first time he’d felt anything at all since watching Bucky’s outstretched hands falling away from him. Later, he was grateful for that – for the way she made him _feel_ something – and later still, he loved her for it, and never told her. Fate didn’t work that way then, and it doesn’t still.

He’s doing it again. Living in the past. _None of us can go back._ But old habits die hard. It would be easier to stay here, his face hidden in the crocheted comforter, breathing in the faint smell of rosewater, lulled by the trundle of the coffee cart and the gameshow themes echoing down the hall. Sorting through old memories, the pain of them dulled by time.

Peggy pushed back, all her life. Doors shut in her face. She prised them open, _blew_ themopen with the force of her fury. She didn’t stop, not ever. Steve knows he broke her heart, and even that couldn’t stop her. All the men that broke her heart, and tried to break her spirit. She kept going, and Steve knows he’s got no excuse to do anything but keep going, too, even if it feels like he’s unspooling.

Steve opens his eyes, still resting his cheek on Peggy’s comforter. Peggy is awake now; her hand is resting near his face, as though she reached out to touch him while his face was buried in her bedclothes. The skin is stretched translucent over her bones, spotted with age. Fingers clenched into fragile, arthritic fists, still half-poised to fight off the world’s injustices. Steve sits up stiffly.

Peggy is watching him, and Steve tries to smile. It feels wrong on his face, as though those muscles have atrophied from underuse.

‘You look sad, dear,’ Peggy says gently. ‘Would you like some Turkish Delight?’

She might recognise him; it’s hard to tell. Sometimes she thinks he’s her nurse; sometimes her nephew; sometimes a stranger. It’s tough, watching Peggy be uncertain about anything.

He accepts a cube of Turkish Delight from her. A puff of powdered sugar rises up between their fingers. Lemon flavoured, sharp and fresh. Like a nickel’s worth of lemonade on sticky summer days, the heat trapped between the buildings. Bucky’s hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, Steve’s nose turning pink.

‘I lost a friend,’ Steve says, even if she doesn’t recognise him. The lemon taste turns chemical on his teeth.

Peggy licks powdered sugar from the ends of her fingers. She always was meticulous.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, dear,’ she says. Her voice is kinder than it used to be. She no longer has much need to steel herself against the world and its prejudices. She nudges the box of Turkish Delight across to Steve. ‘I hope you find him again soon.’

Steve takes another piece. Chewing helps hide the way his mouth threatens to twist. Peggy always makes him feel like crying; today, even more than usual. Rose flavoured, this time. Light and aromatic and old-fashioned. Tastes like yesterdays. 

‘I hope so, too,’ Steve says. That’s the thing with hope: it fades.

*

The bell over the door tinkles as Steve steps in off the street. That’s something he’s not heard in seventy years; this is a world of automatic sliding doors and electronic alarms, and this store is a tiny, dusty time capsule nestled between skyscrapers.

‘Can I help you with anything, young man?’ the old proprietor asks, peering through milk bottle glasses. _Young man._

‘I – uh.’ Steve pulls the scrap of paper from his pocket and hands it over. ‘My – a – a friend recommended this.’

The old man squints at the piece of paper, and disappears wordlessly into the back. Steve wanders around the tiny store, between crowded, teetering racks of records, tracing the tips of his fingers through the dust on their thin spines.

Nostalgia is a dangerous game. It goes nowhere; it loops back and spits the past out, mangled and synthetic and unsatisfying. You can never go back. It hurts to try, to look too closely at those threadbare scraps of memory. But he’s only human. He can hear Peggy saying _well, nobody’s perfect_ , he can perfectly remember the crooked quirk of her smile.

Nobody’s perfect, so sometimes, even though he knows he shouldn’t, he lets himself miss his old life, his old body, misses it until he thinks he’ll stop breathing. Nostalgia’s a dangerous game, but he picks out an old Tommy Dorsey record, the corners of the sleeve tattered and soft, and the proprietor bags it up with the other record, the one Sam recommended.

*

Steve turns down the light and settles in the armchair by the window, his hands on his knees.

The music is sultry. A trickling piano and an insistent, gut-twisting bassline. Brass hotter and dirtier than summer midnights in the city. The hi-hat hiss, hiss, hissing underneath it all, and that voice – that _voice_ – lighter and smoother and deeper than air. Steve drowns in it.

He wonders whether Sam danced to this, growing up, standing on his mother’s feet. Danced with girls, his hands low on their hips, moving lower, his voice still lower in their ears. Maybe he danced for guys, tied up their tongues and choked up their throats with the hypnotic ebb of his body. Maybe.

_There’s only three things for sure_ , the song goes. _Taxes, death, and trouble._

Steve brought Sam nothing but trouble, served it up with a teasing smile in the shadow of monuments, and he brought him death, too, glorious and heroic and meaningless. The record ends, fades out. After a while, Steve realises his face is wet.

*

Days pass, and Steve goes back to the VA. That’s what killers do, isn’t it? _Return to the scene of the crime._ Or maybe this is what pilgrims feel like. Searching for grace, or else for absolution.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting. A funereal hush; candles maybe. Some indication of loss. It’s the same though, slipping through the door. The same stale locker-room linoleum smell, the faint murmur of a meeting in the conference room. The speaker is struggling. Long, weighty pauses. There is a young woman laying out polystyrene cups on a table in the foyer, spooning instant coffee into each one.

Everything in its place. Motivational posters on the wall. _Need to talk?_ Group photos. Counsellors, veterans, physios, men and women broken into pieces and put back together not quite the same way as before. _All the king’s horses and all the king’s men._ Steve doesn’t look too closely at the photographs.

Everything in its place, except for the gap where Sam’s easy smile and gentle confidence should be. Steve doesn’t know how the building’s still standing, without him.

‘Can I help you?’

The young woman is standing exactly where Sam stood, over a fortnight ago now. He looked straight at Steve and _knew,_ without a word, exactly where the scars were deepest. _We all got the same problems. Guilt, regret._

‘Uh. No, I –’ Steve has no idea why he’s here. He’s not the one who should be doing the haunting.

‘Hey, don’t sweat it,’ she says. ‘You stay as long as you like. Ain’t nobody gonna kick you out.’

Steve stuffs his hands in his pockets and wonders if he’s been looking at the world in the wrong way. Since waking up, he’s sought out motion – looked for explosions and crises and people who never stand still, people who live for danger, and have no idea how to exist in its absence. When maybe he should have been looking for this – stillness, quietness. When there’s no background noise, it’s harder to ignore the stumbling sound your heart makes.

‘There’s a meeting just finishing up,’ the woman says. There’s a drawing of a panda on her t-shirt. ‘But you could hang round til four, if you like. That’s our next slot. See if you wanna chat with these folks, just get a feel for the place. Sometimes helps. People usually find it good to just, y’know, sit in on a few. Have a listen. See if you feel like talking.’

He must look battle-scarred. He dreamt about New York again last night. It was all wrong; Sam was there, swooping round skyscrapers, and the aliens were gigantic, prowling beetles, and Steve kept trying to use his shield to dig through a barricade of rubble, and it kept bending. The sky was red, and he woke up sweating, heart thundering. Maybe it shows on his face. Or there’s something in the set of his shoulders. Took him long enough to convince the military to take him - and now they’ve got a hold of him, forever.

Steve wants to say _no, no, you’ve got it all wrong._ He’s about to say he’s not here for help, that he doesn’t belong here. Just passing through.

Oddly, it’s Bruce’s voice that pops into his head. _Steve, everyone needs help._

 ‘I’ll – sure, I’ll think about it,’ he says. He’s not stupid. He knows Sam’s casual little invitation – _why don’t you come down some time?_ – had nothing to do with impressing the receptionist, and everything to do with how Steve saved the world twice, seventy years apart, and was never allowed the time to stop and think about what that cost him.

The meeting breaks up with a round of applause and a cacophony of scraping chairs, shuffling feet. It’s a small group that files out of the conference room, some alone, some in hushed conversation. Some are scarred; some are not, at least not on the surface. Some are missing limbs; some look like they’ve got too many thoughts for a body to ever contain.

Some head home; some stay for coffee. The chocolate cookies go first. Most of the conversation is grumbling about the coffee; it’s easier to talk about coffee than war. How war changes a person. Killing. Watching friends and enemies die. Feeling death miss you by millimetres.

A few people nod at him, and Steve figures it won’t hurt to get some coffee, and they’re right, it tastes like they scraped it off the road. It tastes almost as bad as the stuff he and Bucky used to brew up on their one stuttering gas ring, not enough sugar in the world to make it drinkable. He’s got just enough small talk – yeah, traffic was hell this morning, yeah, must be those roadworks up on 16th – to blend in.

He looks like crap, he knows. He hasn’t shaved for a week, and his clothes are rumpled and grubby because laundry, and ironing, and getting changed to sleep, seem grotesque, so mundane and pointless. All those irritating routines that human beings have devised to distract them from the real life-and-death, flesh-and-bone, heart-and-soul struggles lurking just underneath the surface. He gets a few odd looks, a few stirrings of recognition, but he sees them tamped down quickly. They _can’t_ be looking at Captain America, because Captain America is clean and smooth and whole and perfect, not all sharp, torn edges and week-old stubble and bagged eyes and despair.

‘Would you be interested in signing our book of condolence?’ a middle-aged man in a wheelchair asks Steve. He might be the counsellor; he has a certain air of authority about him that comes more from looking after people than ordering them about.

‘Your…book of condolence?’

‘Yeah. One of our counsellors passed. Died in that – that business with the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers.’

He makes it sound like Sam was a bystander. Just an innocent civilian, caught up at random in evil deeds. Maybe he was, in a way. But it leaves a sour taste in Steve’s mouth to have Sam stripped of his agency, to have his unselfish, steadfast bravery boiled down into a book of remembrance and a few repeated half-truths.

Sam’s a soldier. He’s killed, been trained for it and been paid for it. He’s had to reckon with the blood on his hands, he’s had to square unsavoury orders with marrow-deep, soul-deep morals, the same as Steve, and _still_ he’s good, and kind, and fair. How do you even begin to commemorate that?

Steve could lie. It itches underneath his skin; these people knew Sam in different ways. They came to him in the aftermath of trauma, not at its beginning, or in its unfolding. Some of them knew him for months, _years_ maybe. Steve’s not good enough to stop a stab of jealousy jolt through him.

He could lie; he could say _tell me about him,_ he could use the lie to fill in the gaps, ask the questions he never asked Sam, because he thought there’d be time. Surely he should know by now: there’s never enough time. Steve Rogers, out of time. The clock winds down.

He could lie, but he doesn’t. Natasha would probably roll her eyes.

Instead he crouches over the little table where the book is laid out. There’s a small photograph of Sam in a cheap plastic frame propped up next to it. Sam’s not smiling; it makes him look older. Older than what? His age? Steve only knows that because he’s seen his headstone. Older than Steve remembers him, maybe.

Steve tries not to read other people’s messages, but the words jump off the page in a disjointed cacophony. Everything looks like a platitude when it’s written down. _Brave. Heroic. Sacrifice._ There are only so many words in this or any other language, and none of them quite fit.

He’s used to writing letters to the dead. Every day since waking, he’s seen things that make him think _I should tell Bucky that._ Mad technology, and madder fashions. Gods and aliens. Before the bridge, before the Winter Soldier, he used to wander around cities and suburbs, awash with wonder and alarm in equal measure, composing telegrams.

SGT J B BARNES –STOP– PLEASE BE ADVISED EXISTENCE OF MASKED REPUBLIC –STOP– TELEVISION CHANNEL PLAYING 24 HR MEXICAN WRESTLING –STOP– WHATEVER THAT IS –STOP– DO NOT RECOMMEND PROLONGED EXPOSURE –STOP– 12 HR STINT PROVED DETRIMENTAL TO MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH –STOP– YRS CPT S G ROGERS

He’d try to conjure up Bucky’s facial expressions, the way his eyebrows might leap at the taste of sriracha, how much he’d laugh at the way guys dress these days, his head thrown back. What he’d say. The feeling of his hand on Steve’s wrist. _Steve, tell me you’re joking._ How his eyes would look, and his mouth. The set of his shoulders.

He’d catch himself doing it in meetings (BE WARNED EPIDEMIC Of QUOTE GOATEE UNQUOTE BEARDS SHOWS NO SIGN OF ABATING –STOP– BE AWARE EGOTISTICAL INVENTORS MOST AT RISK –STOP–). It drove him mad. It was such a useless, tragic habit. The loneliness was still gnawing, and it hurt whenever he came up blank, forced to admit that he had no idea what Bucky would have said, or did, or how he’d have looked.

He couldn’t stop, though. It felt too final. Now, though. Maybe they won’t be wasted, after all, those messages to the dead. Maybe he’ll get the chance to tell Bucky, face to face. See whether he guessed his reactions right.

But Sam – Sam doesn’t need to know about Masked Republic, or the cost of oranges, or how bald eagles aren’t endangered anymore, or what a hashtag is, or how Steve thinks _Top Gun_ is kinda overrated. This is Steve’s first letter to Sam, and he owes Sam an explanation. Hell, he owes him his life, but an explanation is as good a place as any to start, and Steve can’t even come up with that. His mouth tastes bitter from cheap instant coffee. His grip on the pen is beginning to slip.

_On your left,_ he writes, finally, and leaves it unsigned. It’s inadequate and trite – but so is the whole exercise, really.

He pauses at the exit and makes a quick, solemn promise – to himself, as much as to Sam – that he’ll look up VAs out in Maryland. Once he’s got Bucky back and HYDRA’s dead and buried, and he’s laid Sam to rest as best he can. There’ll be time, surely. He’s got his whole life ahead of him. 

*

It’s the permanence that’s hardest to grasp. Steve was seven when nice old Mr Lugiano from upstairs died of pleurisy. One of those diseases people don’t die of any more. One of those relics. Steve’s mom sat Steve at the kitchen table and said _Mr Lugiano is dead, Steve._ Steve blinked into his milk. _Do you know what that means, Steve?_

_It means he’s with God._

Steve knew all the answers, all the euphemisms, _gone to be with the angels, gone to a better place._ And he knew, on some level, that _dead_ meant _never coming back_ , that Mrs Lugiano would have nobody to help her with the groceries on the stair. Gradually the stale smell of his tobacco would vanish from the stairwell, and would not return. But he came into his mother’s bedroom the next morning and climbed onto the bed next to her, and asked _is Mr Lugiano still dead?_ because the finality was too much to wrap his mind around.

In the twenty-first century, where people no longer die of pleurisy, Steve wakes up mornings, restless, and thinks, before his mind can catch up with his body, _is Sam still dead?_

The answer is always _yes_.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Dirge Without Music](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237262) by Edna St Vincent Millay.


End file.
